Boris Sanchez has written that he was born in Cuba and landed in Miami the day he turned three. His grandfather had fought in the Cuban revolution, hoping it would bring democracy. On Wednesday, Sanchez put that story to the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America on his CNN show. "Fidel Castro locked my grandfather up," Sanchez said, "sentenced to 20 years for doing what you're doing now on live TV, for speaking his mind."

Then Sanchez asked, "And Fidel Castro was a beacon of democracy?"

"I wouldn't say that," Ashik Siddique answered. "I think that the revolution in Cuba led to an expansion of things like universal healthcare."

Six days earlier, Siddique's organization had published a birthday tribute to Castro, calling him "an organizer, a fighter" and "a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle." And last October, forty of its people flew to Havana as guests of the Cuban government. Both national co-chairs went, and nine other members of its governing board.

Most Americans hear "democratic socialist" and picture Denmark. These people are communists. Their caucuses print the word on their own websites. A man on their national board calls the Constitution the obstacle to revolution. Their convention threw out its own ban on Lenin's party rules. And their leaders fly to a country the State Department lists as a state sponsor of terrorism. That is treachery, and the Democratic Party runs them on its own ballot line.

The Constitution is the obstacle to revolution

Cliff Connolly now sits on the DSA's national governing board, Mediaite reported this week. In July 2025 he went on the podcast Varn Vlog for Marxist Unity Group. "So the two things that we're famous for is our commitment to a program and our hatred of the United States Constitution," he said. "And what the program does is it gives us a roadmap to revolution and it gives us the obstacle that we finally will have to get over to have a revolution, which is the United States Constitution."

Connolly was speaking for Marxist Unity Group, which publishes seven points of unity. The sixth is titled "Fight the Constitution." Its subhead reads: "We want socialists to fight to overthrow the Constitution." Harvard Book Store sells the collected essays under that title.

And Point Six explains how. It stands for "the right of the working class to take power by any means necessary." It warns that "the working class will need armed self-defense to protect itself from the inevitable violence of reaction." Reaction is their word for whatever defends the existing order. And it concludes that "to complete a successful revolution, we must win a decisive section of the military rank and file over to our side." Rank and file means enlisted troops. They are planning to split the U.S. military.

They admit they're communists

The DSA boasted in July that it had passed 120,000 members, the Daily Signal reported. It runs candidates in Democratic primaries, and its factions publish their own platforms. One, DSA Emerge, calls itself "a multi-tendency communist caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America." Another, Reform & Revolution, traces its politics "to the Bolshevik Tradition" and organizes "to overthrow the capitalist state."

Red Star matters most. It opens its points of unity by calling itself "a Marxist-Leninist caucus in DSA" that "seeks to cohere a vanguard party." Lenin built the same thing. A small, tight group rules in the name of the working class.

And last August, roughly 1,200 delegates gathered in Chicago, the liberal American Prospect reported. At the close they stood for "The Internationale," the communist anthem, and waved red flags. The convention repealed the DSA's ban on democratic centralism. The communist magazine Cosmonaut called that ban "a holdover from DSA's anti-communist period." Under democratic centralism, once the group settles a question, every member falls in line in public. Delegates struck the ban 82 percent to 18, as one plank of a bylaws package, one chapter recorded.

Socialist Majority members attacked Red Star's principles in print, faction against faction. The Leninists won the convention anyway.

Both co-chairs flew to Havana as guests of a convicted spy

Red Star writes the rule down. "While no political project is perfect," its principles say, "to publicly critique a government or movement that stands in opposition to the American government is to do the US State Department's work for them, from Iran to Palestine. There is no such thing as a third camp; one is either working to support American imperialism or to oppose it." Siddique belongs to a different caucus. But Megan Romer does not. She is the DSA's other co-chair. She writes for Red Star, which endorsed her last summer. The faction that wrote that rule holds one of the two jobs at the top. Both jobholders flew to Havana.

Their hosts there were ICAP, the Cuban agency that handles foreign guests, and Amistur, the state travel agency. The DSA thanked both agencies by name: "our partners Amistur and ICAP for helping make this delegation possible."

Fernando Gonzalez Llort runs ICAP. He served fifteen years in an American prison for spying on the United States, part of the Wasp Network, the Cuban ring the FBI broke up in Florida. Eight months after the DSA visit, the State Department sanctioned his agency, calling ICAP "a Cuban organization founded by Fidel Castro in 1960 that supports Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence activities." On Thursday Rubio sanctioned Gonzalez himself, "a convicted Cuban spy who served 15 years in U.S. prison for his role in the infamous Wasp Network."

But somebody pays for the flights. The Venceremos Fund asks donors for monthly gifts to "support the struggle to dismantle U.S. empire." City Journal reported what the DSA's Cuba Solidarity Working Group wants: bring "endorsed electeds" along, "cultivate Cuba's solidarity in up-and-coming politicians," and build a "pro-Cuba block basically of elected officials," most of all "at the federal level." They are building a bloc of American officials loyal to Havana.

China wants to control the DSA

Cuba is not the only stop. Newsweek reviewed minutes from the DSA's China working group. That same October, an activist told the meeting that "China wants to interface with the DSA." "If we develop a killer two-week itinerary, hire locals and develop further connections with the CPC, then we're golden," one said. The CPC is the Chinese Communist Party. In minutes from 2021, a member called it "an exaggeration" that a million Uyghurs were being brutalized in Xinjiang, and "not a genocide or Holocaust." China has held more than a million Uyghur Muslims in camps.

New York's DSA chapter had Hasan Piker headline a rally in June. He is one of the biggest left-wing streamers in the country. He sat for an interview with CGTN, the Chinese government's English channel, and called China "just another normal country." In a livestream quoted by Fox News, he called Mao Zedong "one of the great leaders of this world." Challenged by his own viewers, he said "there was a lot of f-----g excesses, let's be real," and that "the People's Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong." Mao's famine killed tens of millions.

No one has shown that Piker pays DSA dues. Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, won his primary this month. He says he is "not technically or practically DSA." He headlined a 2019 Detroit DSA fundraiser, where the chapter called him "a longtime friend." Dues are a technicality. The DSA chose both men and put them on its stage, and neither has renounced a word of the program.

The DSA does Havana's work for free

The State Department's July report gave the DSA a section of its own. Marco Rubio's department found that the group "was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government itself." It "freely embraced the policy agenda and worldview of its own accord."

The DSA called that vindication. "Despite Rubio's attempt to smear us," its August statement says, "his report admits that DSA does not organize on behalf of the Cuban Government, only of its own accord."

They stopped reading one sentence early. The very next sentence says: "None of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network." And a paragraph earlier, the report says why that cuts against them: "This represents a significant advance for the Cuban influence operation: Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States."

So the only question the DSA wants asked is whether anyone pays them. Nobody has produced a check. A hostile government does not need to recruit an agent when it already has a volunteer.

Communism buried a hundred million people, and these are the Americans who flew to Havana to throw a party on the grave. They are communists. They went to toast the man who jailed Boris Sanchez's grandfather for talking. That is treachery, and it does not belong on a Democratic ballot line. Every Democrat running beside them should say so, and then throw them out of the party.